New Year, New You?

I’ve long been fascinated by New Year celebrations. When I was a kid, we would stay up on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop, then run around banging pots and pans. When I was an adolescent, I would dream of attending a party where my crush would kiss me at midnight (but then I would almost certainly stay home, watch the ball drop, and bang pots and pans).

As an adult, the Eve seems less important than the New Year itself. A new leaf, a new chapter, a new start.

Or is it? I remember when it occurred to me in my 20s how arbitrary that idea is., that the planet’s trip around the sun would correspond with this wonderful reset button in our lives. I even blogged about it back in 2011, quoting some of my then-favorite songs about this holiday, like “The Ice of Boston” by The Dismemberment Plan and “Next Year, Baby” by Jamie Cullum.

In the years since, I’ve discovered some more iconic New Year songs—and they also point out the arbitrary and futile nature of the holiday! In U2’s “New Years Day,” Bono explicitly laments—”Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.” And Death Cab for Cutie starts their wonderfully melancholic “The New Year” with the lyric, “So this is the new year, and I don't feel any different.”

So if you’re looking for some sad tunes to balance out the glitz and glam of New Year’s, they’re out there.

But even if the day is arbitrary, even if it’s just something we declare for ourselves—New Year’s is an opportunity to change. To make different decisions, to face challenges with new passion. To love others more fully.

Viewed this way, for those of the Christian faith, a new year is like an invitation from God—to take off the old and put on the new. To set aside our tribalism, our bitterness, our elitism; to “clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”

As we do, we issue a return invitation to God. An invitation for the Spirit to do her work: to make us more like Christ, full of love and overflowing with hope.

These two analogies for the life of faith are common in Scripture: wardrobe changes and issuing invitations. The New Testament often implores us to change the spiritual clothes we’re wearing. The Old Testament is replete with hospitality imagery, and Revelation tells us that a banquet is coming and that Jesus stands at the door and knocks.

New year. New clothes. New you.